Financial Times

Attitude is a problem
Unemployment in Sri Lanka is largely voluntary
Unemployment in Sri Lanka is purely voluntary, according to a top researcher and a former government official.
Renton De Alwis, a former chairman of the Ceylon Tourist Board and former CEO of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (CCC), cited a World Bank policy report as saying that:

“Sri Lanka's high unemployment rate has been attributed to a mismatch of skills, to queuing for public sector jobs, and to stringent job security regulations. But the empirical evidence supporting this position is weak. A time-series analysis of the impact of unemployment on wage increases across sectors, supports the hypothesis that most of the unemployed are waiting for ‘good’ job openings but are not interested in readily available ‘bad’ jobs. In short, unemployment in Sri Lanka is largely voluntary. The problem is not a shortage of jobs but the artificial gap between good and bad jobs.”

He said Sri Lanka may not be lacking in jobs because for example, there are 15,000 vacancies in the garments sector which remain unfilled but the problem as cited in the World Bank report was about good jobs and bad jobs.
He was speaking at a discussion on unemployment, education and related issues at the monthly meeting of The Sunday Times Business Club held recently. The club is hosted by the Trans Asia Hotel and co-sponsored by Lion Brewery (Ceylon) Ltd.

De Alwis, team leader of a Social Communication programme of an ILO-led initiative on a Youth Employment Network (YEN) in Sri Lanka, said 7.8 percent or 280,0000 of Sri Lanka’s 7.6 million labour force is unemployed while 120,000 people enter the job market every year.

Posing the question “Why is unemployment our (civil) problem”, De Alwis said that it makes good business sense for the business community to be concerned and involved in these issues. The unemployed could be a potent force and disrupt businesses if they don’t have jobs and are idle. On the other hand an employed individual is a consumer who buys products from the private sector.

In the whole phase of unemployment, De Alwis said attitudes were the main problem. For example most people think arts graduates are useless because they don’t know English. “But we fail to realise that this is an intelligent set of people who are among the select few able to get into university amongst thousands of other who fail to get sufficient marks for university entrance,” he said.

De Alwis said the Youth Employment Network (YEN) aims to place positive attitudes among youth and other key people of Sri Lankan society on employment issues, where dignity of labour and productive engagement will prevail “to ensure a better future for each of them and our nation”

He said the project seeks to design ways to change attitudes. It focuses on employability; equal opportunities; entrepreneurship and employment creation
Chandra Jayaratne, a former CCC Chairman and currently managing director of Eagle Insurance, referred to the perception of education in the country. “Look … we often complain about garbage collection. But then you find someone (an educated person) going and dumping garbage in another person’s road. Is that education? Is that responsibility? So how does one measure education?” he asked.

He called for changes in attitudes in Sri Lanka, saying it all boils down to one’s perception. For example, it was pointed out that there are 15,000 jobs for rubber tappers in Malaysia but no takers from Sri Lanka. “What a change it would have been to ask our males to take these jobs and not send their wives or mothers to the Middle East as housemaids,” he said adding that if attitudes could be changed many jobs could be filled for male nurses in the west including the United States, where there is a huge demand for nursing staff.

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